Hoovervilles During The Great Depression

In the 1930s, something terrible happened, it was called the Great Depression. During the Great Depression people lost their jobs and homes. The most terrible thing was probably the start of Hoovervilles. Hoovervilles were created because of Herbert Hoover’s poor conditions with the economy. Hoovervilles are a very important part of history; the important topics of Hoovervilles are knowing what they are, where they were located, and how life was like living in them.
The first thing that is important to know about Hoovervilles is understanding what they are. Hoovervilles were very shanty, poor towns. This place is where unemployed and very poor people lived when the Great Depression got worse. Also, anybody could live there from urban to rural …show more content…
Hoovervilles were mostly located on the outside of towns and cities (“Hoovervilles”). “Camps were set up on the worst type of unused or public land often on the outskirts of towns and cities” (Press). Mostly Hoovervilles were built by bodies of water for resources if they had a chance to be built by a body of water (“Hoovervilles”). A lot of Hoovervilles were set up by charities or by a place selling goods (George). The biggest and long lasting Hooverville was in St. Louis, Missouri (“Hoovervilles”). Although, Seattle, Washington, was very big too, they managed to make their own “town” and elect a person for a “mayor” in their Hooverville town (“Shanty Town Facts”). Some Hoovervilles were small as well, and they were located mostly in town where people could see them. The smaller Hoovervilles were mostly in the rural areas. The Hoovervilles in California were fairly small. San Francisco people had their shelters made up of old troll cars. In Oakland, they had Hoovervilles in a field with concrete sewer pipes and hardly had a roof over their heads (George). During the horrible 1930s, Hoovervilles were literally everywhere and they kept spreading dramatically throughout the Great Depression especially when it …show more content…
Hoovervilles had almost nothing but bad conditions. They had no electricity or running water (George). The homeless people that were already homeless before the Great Depression, were forced to live in the absolute worst part of the Hoovervilles. When the weather would get very bad, they didn’t have any good shelter or protection. During the winter a lot of people that lived in Hoovervilles got asked to stay in empty jail cells because it was so bad (“Shanty Town Facts”). When the weather would get super cold, they used newspapers to keep warm, which were then later known as “Hoover Blankets” (Press). The worst part of the Hoovervilles conditions is probably all the illnesses they cause. They caused people tuberculosis, diphtheria, diarrhea, rickets, influenza, pneumonia and skin disease, and they had no medical care for them (“Shanty Town Facts”). “People who lived in Hoovervilles did not have access to medical facilities and the living conditions in the shanty towns bred sickness and disease”(american-historama). Hoovervilles also had rules they had to go by in each individual Hooverville. In the bigger cities they had their own government rules they had to go by. The rules were throw away trash and other things, keeping their cooking fires in appropriate places, and boiling drinking water (George). Life like in the Hoovervilles were very hard and scary with